According to a report over at Donanimhaber.com, Intel's new Core i7-3970X flagship "extreme" CPU is scheduled to appear in Q4 2012.

The Core i7-3970X is going to replace the current Core i7-3960X and it is basically just a minor speed bump. According to available details, it could end up working at 3.5GHz base and 4.0GHz Turbo clock. Of course, it will still be based on 32nm Sandy Bridge-E architecture and feature 6 cores with HyperThreading support, have 15MB of L3 cache and come with unlocked multiplier since it is a part of "Extreme Edition" lineup.

The Core i7-3970X should also pack a same quad-channel DDR3 memory controller with support for up to DDR3-1600 memory and have a 130W TDP, same as on the Core i7-3960X.

The good side of the story is that it should replace the Core i7-3960X EE CPU that should probably experience a slight drop in price before it phases out of the market.

Noctua has rolled out a new special edition of its quite famous NH-D14 cooler that now has support for Intel' LGA2011 X79 platform. Featuring a dual-heatsink design, six heatpipes and dual-fan configuration, the Noctua NH-D14 will probably have no trouble in coping with Intel's Sandy Bridge-E CPUs.

As it was the case with all recent Noctua CPU coolers, this one also features Noctua's SecuFirm2 mounting system with vibration compensators and comes bundled with NT-H1 termal compound. Spec wise, the 160x140x158mm large and 1.24kg heavy NH-D14 features a cooper base connected to two aluminum heatsink via six copper heatpipes. This one will ship with 120mm NF-P12 PWM and 140mm NF-P14 PWM fans that spin up to a maximum of 1300RPM.

We are quite sure that NH-D14 will be used in a more than few Sandy Bridge-E overclocking ventures, at least those air-cooled ones. The new NH-D14 will be backed by a 6-year warranty and should be available soon with a suggested price tag set at €74.90/US $84.90.

During the Nvidia Geforce LAN 6 event held at Alameda, California, EVGA showed off its first motherboard based on the upcoming Intel LGA2011 X79 chipset, the XL-ATX form-factor EVGA X79 Classified aka E779.

The motherboard is cooled by a rather large, but still thin and passive heatsink. In addition to the E779 motherboard, EVGA plans to introduce two more, the E777 aka EVGA X79 FTW and the E775 aka EVGA X79 SLI.

According to a post over at VR-Zone, it appears that Intel won't ship its stock cooler with Sandy Bridge-E but rather sell them seperately. This sounds like a good idea, especially for an enthusiast part such as Sandy Bridge-E, as most users will simply go for third-party cooling solution.

The upcoming Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition, Core i7-3930K and Core i7-3820 will not be shipping as now already standard "boxed" model that features a stock cooler, but rather as a tray with optional stock cooler that will be sold seperately. This could somewhat lower the price of these models but also give more room to enthusiasts as they won't end up with an unused stock cooler as they often go for more hefty third-party coolers as well as some water-cooling systems.

There has been quite a few benches of Sandy Bridge-E engineering samples and although they are rated at 130W TDP they have quite some room for additional overclocking that will of course raise the TDP even higher.

Of course, we expect most, if not all, companies to come up with their own LGA2011 solutions once these CPUs launch.

The guys from Donanimhaber.com managed to score some slides revealing the performance of the upcoming Sandy Bridge-E processor series, or to be precise, the flaghsip Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition. In general, the new Sandy Bridge-E is around 47% faster on average when compared to Intel's current top offer, the Core i7-990X Extreme Edition.

As it was detailed earlier, the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition is Intel's top offer in the upcoming Sandy Bridge-E CPU lineup and supports the upcoming LGA2011 socket. It features six cores ticking at 3.3GHz with Turbo Boost of up to 3.9GHz, has 12 threads with HyperThreading and a total of 15MB of L3 cache.

The test lineup has some quite interesting benches including Cinebench 11.5, 3DMark 11, Sisoft Sandra and much more. As noted, Intel's upcoming socket LGA2011 Core i7-3960X EE is 47.25% faster on average when pitched to go against the current socket LGA1366 Core i7-990X EE CPU. In its slides, Intel claims that the perfromance boost comes from 33% higher memory bandwidth on the quad-channel DDR3 as well as from the new AVX instruction set that takes care of CPU intensive tasks.

There has been some rumours regarding the Sandy Bridge-E launch date and as far as we know, Intel is currently talking about late October/early November although our best bet is end of October. Also you can expect some serious feature packed motherboards from partners once Intel gives a green light.

Trying to build up hype for Intel's X79 launch, EVGA has posted a teaser picture of its upcoming motherboard based on the upcoming Intel X79 chipset. Although the picture doesn't reveal that much, we are glad to hear that EVGA is working on such product and we are quite sure that this one will pack some nice features.

The picture shows a CPU part of the motherboard and a lovely black PCB, something that we always liked on EVGA motherboards. There are four black memory slots, power, reset and clear CMOS buttons, 8-pin CPU power connector and what appears to be an angled 24-pin power connector.

Also on the uper part of the picture you can notice a rahter thick heatpipe that gos somewhere unknown so far. Of course, all we need now is EVGA to release this motherboard and Intel to push its Sandy Bridge-E LGA 2011 CPU to retail/e-tail shelves.